“You remember what this job was like, back in the old days?”
The buyer’s advocate with the red tie looked up from the water cooler, having just poured himself a fresh drink. “You mean before the Collapse?”
“Yeah,” said Blue Tie, “before the Collapse. Before we got recruited to this underground facility. When we could actually show people houses and stuff, rather than just look through files and make notes about how to recreate an entire suburb.”
“Yeah, I remember. But you do realise that the entire world was overrun by giant cockroaches, right? Like, there wasn’t really much for us back there.”
Blue Tie chuckled at that. “You really believe that? I was a buyer’s agent near Hawthorn, and I never saw a single giant cockroach, even though they were supposedly overrunning the entire city. It was all just a big ruse to control us.”
Red Tie crossed his arms, looking extremely uncomfortable all of a sudden. “My entire family was eaten by giant cockroaches. And there were plenty of buyer’s advocates based in Melbourne that work here now – just ask anybody. Those cockroaches were definitely real.”
“But your family wasn’t actually eaten by giant cockroaches.” Blue Tie rolled his eyes. “That was just a lie fed to you by the government to make you afraid.”
Shaking his head, it seemed Red Tie was just about done with this conversation. “They were eaten before my very eyes. Besides, the government isn’t even a thing anymore, so how could this have been orchestrated by them.”
Blue Tie tsked loudly. “That’s exactly what they want you to think. You’re clearly just a sheep who will go along with anything they say. Believe me, they’re still controlling things behind the scenes.”
Blue Tie confidently turned away, as if he’d won the argument somehow, and Red Tie could only shake his head in disbelief at the audacity of the man.
He placed a hand on his brow and said, “Why do I always get stuck with the crazy conservatives?”